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The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

Walter Bagehot

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Walter Bagehot
Age: 51 †
Born: 1826
Born: February 3
Died: 1877
Died: March 24
Businessperson
Economist
Engineer
Journalist
Political Scientist
Politician
Sociologist
Langport
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More quotes by Walter Bagehot

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A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.
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Women--one half the human race at least--care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry.
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A political country is like an American forest you have only to cut down the old trees, and immediately new trees come up to replace them.
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A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.
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Life is a school of probability.
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An ambassador is not simply an agent he is also a spectacle.
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So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.
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The business of banking ought to be simple. If it is hard it is wrong. The only securities which a banker, using money that he may be asked at short notice to repay, ought to touch, are those which are easily saleable and easily intelligible.
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Nine tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers - who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them - who, as the proverb went, 'walked into a well from looking at the stars' - who were believed to be useless, if anyone could be such.
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The real essence of work is concentrated energy - people who really have that in a superior degree by nature are independent of the forms and habits and artifices by which less able and less active people are kept up to their labors.
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The best security for people's doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do.
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The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds.
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No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
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Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality it tends to over-government in point of quantity.
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One cannot make men good by Act of Parliament.
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When great questions end, little parties begin.
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A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.
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The peculiar essence of our banking system is an unprecedented trust between man and man. And when that trust is much weakened by hidden causes, a small accident may greatly hurt it, and a great accident for a moment may almost destroy it.
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We must not let daylight in upon the magic.
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An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.
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